


Do You Remember

by frostryn



Series: The People's Tomb Fic Jam Prompts [4]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Discord: The People's Tomb (Locked Tomb Trilogy), During Canon, F/F, Harrow is pretty much just mentioned, The People's Tomb Fic Jam (Locked Tomb Trilogy), The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Pride, someone give this gal a hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:08:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26899429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frostryn/pseuds/frostryn
Summary: Gideon, stuck in Harrow's body, muses about the meaning of hatred.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Series: The People's Tomb Fic Jam Prompts [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1939300
Comments: 15
Kudos: 61





	Do You Remember

**Author's Note:**

> This is the final prompt for The People's Tomb discord's Fandom Jam: "First."

  
Harrow, do you remember the first time you told me you hated me? I know, I know, you said it a hundred thousand million times so how could I possibly remember the first time—but I do. It wasn’t the consequence of any real argument, any enormous slight that followed us for the rest of our lives, no, the first time was fantastically mundane. I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t remember because we were children, but you were the one to cross that line all those eons ago. It was your bad. I must have been five and you must have been four and we had always been—thanks to your asshole infanticidal parents who saddled you with the life debt of two hundred, but I’m getting off-track here—we had always been the only two children of Drearburh. We were the future reverend mother and the horrid indebted foundling they never wanted in the first place, the future cavalier primary unbeknownst to everyone. I’m pretty sure they only kept me around after I flew through the drop-chute like a gift from the heavens duck-taped to a corpse because they needed numbers to make you. Which is gross, but it wasn’t your fault, so I digress. 

Back then, things were so much simpler. We didn’t know what hatred meant. Still, even as children, you had never liked me. Maybe it was because you were mimicking the way your parents treated me, like I was a cockroach who showed up unexpectedly wriggling in their porridge, maybe it was because you were jealous of my amazing hair. I followed you everywhere back then, I was an audience and a subject for your torment. We were inseparable because the only other option was _Ortus_ , and compared to him you were the picture of pleasant company.  
  
At four years old, you were a necromantic powerhouse. You were everything your parents had ever dreamed, able to unfurl a skeleton fully formed from a single rib, even though it took blood sweat and time. You were the deaths of two hundred, a walking horror, the greatest necromancer of your generation, and you were absolutely enraged that day when I stumbled into you on the field and interrupted your intense concentration. The half-formed skeleton crumbled back into the dirt and that was the first time you said it. You whipped around, already draped in the vestments of your office, rounded baby cheeks coated in ninth-house grease paint, and you shouted _“I hate you!”_ You shoved me into the ground but hadn’t expected me to grab your robe and take you down with me, so within seconds we were rolling in the dirt and screeching incoherently. Was it Crux or Aiglamene that separated us that day? It couldn’t have been your parents, if they’d seen me holding you down with one elbow on your neck and spitting on your painted face I would have been flung off the top tier of Drearburh faster than I could say _oopsie!_

That was the first time I said it too, mid-face-spitting, and despite the fact that I had already known even back then it was enormously painful to hear you say those words. We were kids, emotional regulation was low and trauma was high and all we had was each other. It hurt because I hadn’t meant to bother you, not that time. It hurt because nobody had ever loved me and I knew—and I know—that you didn’t, couldn’t, won’t, but back then I thought we could have been friends. It was foolish for me to think that too, because I didn’t even know what being friends meant. I didn’t know what any of it meant, because a childhood on the ninth is substandard and chock full of having a weird relationship with everything for the rest of your miserable, dementia ridden life. But whatever it meant then—that I was the greatest inconvenience on the ninth, destroyer of your constructs, irritation incarnate—that meaning transmutated into something different for me over time.  
  


Harrow, I don’t know how to tell you—and I can’t anyway because you aren’t here, because you left me to babysit your meatsuit without even asking me what I wanted first—but you have no idea how much it meant to hear you say those three, awful words. _I hate you_ was so much more than it said on the tin. It meant I was an inconvenience you couldn’t ignore, a constant thorn in your side, inexorable. I was an annoyance omnipresent in the back of your cranium, I was something you couldn’t disregard. When you told me you hated me, something in my soul rejoiced. I can’t describe that feeling to you because you’ve probably never felt anything like it for someone alive, because your one true love is apparently a ten thousand year old frozen corpse. It meant, when we were both bloody faced and snarling in the dirt, when you absolutely kicked my ass and left me spitting out teeth, that I had always been the focus of your attention. In those fights we had, violent and horrible, which left us spattered with bruises and scars, I was the only thing in your mind. And you were the only thing in mine. You always were, even when I lay awake at night in my cell, fantasizing about getting off the ninth.  
  
It always came back to you, Nonagesimus. I imagined how you would clutch the letters the cohort sent home about me and admit, begrudgingly, that I had been valuable. In that scornful, sepulchral voice you would grumble, _“I suppose those muscles were worth something after all.”_ I thought about how the ninth would be worse off without me, the only vital thing about it. I wanted you to miss me. I wanted you to curse the day I had left. I had hoped that when I escaped that morning in the shuttle I would be driving a stake into your heart, finally able to get in that last word. That last _I hate you._  
  
It would have been so much easier if your last words to me had been _I hate you_ , but instead you told me that you couldn’t continue living without me. Maybe they had always been the same thing, three words draped in so much suffering and history that they morphed into something else entirely. I think it hurts even more to know with absolute certainty that you had been lying.  
  
You left me to pilot your corporeal vessel without so much as maintenance instructions. I was supposed to have died, Harrow, I should have been burning somewhere in your soul for an eternity. I wanted you to destroy every trace of me, to rend my very existence to shreds, to be fueled by my death and finally achieve your dreams of serving the emperor and revitalizing your house. I wanted you to hate me for dying, but you couldn’t even give me that. I had always been afraid that you would forget me, down in that cell in the dark. And you did. You forgot me, erased me, sawed open your own brain and suffered hemorrhage after hemorrhage because you just couldn’t bear to be in my debt.  
  
There is so much else I wish I could say to you, but Harrow, all I need is to hear your voice. I need you to tell me that you hate me. Please tell me that you hate me, let me burn within you forever. For once, you pointy-faced, bone obsessed, ninth nun shitbag, do this for me. Please.

**Author's Note:**

> This is like the shortest thing I've written for a jam so I hope everyone still enjoys it, and as always feel free to talk to me at [frostryn](https://frostryn.tumblr.com/) on tumblr!


End file.
